A Chagossian Statement of Self-Determination

Here:

To His Majesty’s Government, Members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, the peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth, and the international community of nations.

There has rightly been much focus on the inhumane treatment of our people by the then British Government and Republic of Mauritius in our forced removal from our islands to Mauritius between 1968 and 1973.

However, we agree with the Republic of Mauritius that in order to correct what went wrong we have to go back not to 1968 but to 8 November 1965.

The presenting difficulty, however, is not what happened on 8 November 1965 but how it happened.

The advisory Judgment of the International Court of Justice of 2019 rightly states:

‘The Court considers that the peoples of non-self-governing territories are entitled to exercise their right to self-determination in relation to their territory as a whole, the integrity of which must be respected by the administering Power. It follows that any detachment by the administering Power of part of a non-self-governing territory, unless based on the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned, is contrary to the right to self-determination.’

This demonstrates that the problem with the detachment of what became the British Indian Ocean Territory from the same colonial unit as that pertaining to the island of Mauritius, was not that it amounted to detachment, or detachment before decolonisation, but that it constituted detachment without ‘the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned.’

We the people of what then became the British Indian Ocean Territory, the Chagossians, were not consulted and the detachment was not the result of our self-determination.

That was wrong.

But what is more wrong is repeating that failure sixty years later, changing our destiny in 2025 without affording us self-determination for a second time.

Those seeking to justify ‘returning’ the Chagos Islands to Mauritius argue that this amounts to the completion of decolonisation of the pre 8th November 1965 colony, as if our guide in 2025 should be the territorial integrity of that colony rather than the self-determination of the peoples of the Chagos Islands.

Things went wrong in November 1965 precisely because the people of the Chagos Islands were denied self-determination and they are about to go wrong again, exactly sixty years later, because rather than learning from past mistakes, the current Labour Government seems determined to repeat those of the Labour Government in 1965, marking the sixtieth anniversary of ‘denying the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned’ by doing so once again.

In order to appreciate the acute moral failure attending the present Government’s policy it is important to consider what happened to another British colony that also comprised two sets of islands, separated by a great distance, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.

The parallels are striking.

While the distance between what were then called the Gilbert and Ellice Islands was just over 800 miles, the islands were populated by peoples of different dominant ethnicities, one set of island Polynesian, the other Micronesian, and the population of the former far greater than the latter, the distance between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands was 1,339 miles, the dominant ethnicity of the former Indian, while the latter is Black African, and the ‘numbers disparity’ even more profound, the Mauritians greatly outnumbering the Chagossians.

When the British Government talked to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands about decolonisation the representatives of the Ellice Islands said that they were nervous about the idea of being part of a sovereign independent state comprising both the Ellice Islands and the Gilbert Islands, not simply because they constituted different nations, separated by great distances, but also because they were concerned that their voice would necessarily be lost in a polity dominated by the far larger number of residents of the Gilbert Islands. The UK responded by providing a self-determination referendum for the people of the Ellice Islands giving them the option to freely choose either to be part of the same unit as the Gilbert Islands or to separate. They voted to separate from the Gilbert Islands, 3,799 votes to 293. The UK honoured this by making provision for the colony to first be divided into two new colonies and then, two years later, for the Ellice Islands to become the independent monarchy of Tuvalu, while the following year the Gilbert Islands became the independent Republic of Kiribati.

The problem that underpins the position of the Chagos Islands today is that in 1965 the Mauritians decided to accept the proposition that the Chagos Islands and their people be separated from Mauritius in return for £3 million (£70 million in today’s money) and that this was effected without giving us, the people of the territory in question, the opportunity to self-determine our future, whether to remain joined to Mauritius or become separate.

Had we been afforded the treatment the judgment says we should have been afforded before moving to detach, namely ‘the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned’ in a ‘self-determination referendum,’ it is no more likely that the people of the Chagos Islands would have self-determined to be part of Mauritius, a country 1339 miles away with which, in 1965, we had virtually no contact, than it was that the Ellice Islands would have voted to remain joined to the Gilbert Islands.

In order to really confront the injustice meted out against us, we need only reflect that had the Ellice Islands been detached from the Gilbert Islands, and continued as a new colony on the basis of the consent of the government of the Gilbert Islands rather than the self-determination of the people of the Ellice Islands, they could now reclaim them, and the UK Government would return them to ‘complete decolonisation’. This would happen in a context where we know – because of the self-determination referendum that actually was held – that rather than amounting to the completion of decolonisation, this sleight of hand would actually confound it.

From this perspective we can see that the Mauritians have failed the Chagossians twice.

In the first instance, they presumed to speak on our behalf in relation to our territory, in a way that denied our self-determination to detach.

In the second instance, they are now seeking to deny the self-determination of the peoples of the territory of the Chagos Islands once again, on the basis that their denial of our claim to self-determination in 1965 was not valid and so they must be afforded a second opportunity to determine our future.

In this context the moral failure of the United Kingdom and Mauritius in effecting our forced removal from our territory to Mauritius, far from removing the imperative to provide us with a self-determination referendum, now places that in even sharper focus.

This is greatly compounded by the fact that the UK is now proposing paying the Republic of Mauritius, rather than the Chagossian people, significantly more money for the lease of just one of our islands than KPMG has demonstrated it would take to resettle us on our islands.

In recent years there has been much repenting of colonialism within certain parts of the West, including the United Kingdom.

The problem with colonialism is one of alienation.

In its conventional form it is problematic because it alienates a people from the dignity of self-government of their home territory, but not from that territory.

They can continue to live on the territory that is their home and nurture the hope that at some point they might be afforded the dignity of self-government.

The colonialism to which we have been subjected, however, presented a far more extreme and unusual alienation because it alienated us not just from the dignity of a measure of self-government but far more problematically, from our territory, our home, by taking it from us.

If the international community is serious in its commitment to decolonise then it cannot afford to accommodate either alienation.

To do so, however, in the context of re-denying the people concerned self-determination while simultaneously paying a country that played a key role in denying that people self-determination in relation to their territory on the previous occasion, more money than is required to resettle the people with the rightful claim to the territory, in order to lease one of their islands, demonstrates extreme moral disorientation.

In this context the policy of the current Government to state that what happened between 1968 and 1973 was deeply wrong but then not lift a finger to put that right, even as they demonstrate that the resources are more than available to do so, not only makes the condemnation of what happened between 1968 and 1973 completely hollow, but also necessarily has the effect of affirming the validity of what happened.

In this we would appeal not just to the House of Commons and House of Lords, but to the British people to join us in calling out this moral failure and disorientation which dishonours the standing of the United Kingdom that actually has, in so many other ways, so much to be proud of.

Crucially, the Mauritius Treaty that constitutes the vehicle for marking the 60th anniversary of the denial of our self-determination through its reaffirmation, and in terms that make the attending moral failure that much starker through its payment of vast sums for the use of our island to another people, has not yet been ratified.

Its ratification can be stopped and the repeat of the moral failures of 1965 in 2025 prevented if Parliament refuses to pass the Diego Garcia Bill currently in the House of Lords.

In this context we would appeal, first, to His Majesty’s Government to do the right thing and withdraw the bill and instigate a self-determination referendum for the Chagossian people residing in the UK, the Republic of Mauritius and the Seychelles.

We would also urge members of the House of Commons and House of Lords to press the Government to adopt this course, and if the Government does not listen, refuse to pass the Diego Garcia Bill. 

Furthermore, we would also appeal to the good people of the United Kingdom, who have not been caught up in the moral confusion and disorientation of the current policy, to stand up with us and tell the Government that in the context of the precedents arising from the treatment of the people of the Ellice Islands, that the people of the Chagos Islands must now be afforded the same dignity and the Diego Garcia Bill be withdrawn.

There follow more than 650 signatures, a substantial proportion of the Chagossian population of Britain, and not an insignificant proportion of the Chagossian population of the world.